Exploring Microsoft Excel's Features

We have all heard of the versatility of Microsoft Excel, whether from colleagues, friends, or acquaintances using this invaluable tool to make sense of raw data. But what exactly does Microsoft Excel do?
Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool that enables users to organize, analyze, and visualize data to meet the needs of the user and the target audience for insights from data. From simple calculations like addition, subtraction, and multiplication using small data, creating pivot tables, to complex financial modelling, Excel can help one unpack insights from data.

Excel offers real-world utility to professionals from diverse fields. Management can base their business decisions on Excel output data after analyzing sales trends, demand forecasts, and inventory levels for effective resource planning and utilization.
Excel helps accounting and finance professionals do financial reporting by preparing and unpacking financial statements and budgets. They can use the tool to make calculations, develop reports for top management and shareholders.
Excel is also useful to marketers for tracking key metrics at the core of marketing strategies. Customer engagement, ratings and satisfaction scores for different products are examples of elements marketers can analyze using Excel.

Since beginning to learn Excel as a beginner, I have picked up on different features that are important when handling data. I will examine the three that have stuck out for me so far. These are:

1. Conditional Formatting: Conditional formatting reveals and highlights important values based on the users’ needs. These include values across a certain range, the top most and bottom values ina dataset and highlighting duplicate values.
2. VLOOKUP: This function helps one retrieve data by allowing you to search for a certain value in a table and returns the value in the desired column in the same row.
3. IF Function: This function enables one to extract only the desired data with conditions or criteria the data user has set. One must assign the value Excel returns if a condition is true and another value if it’s false. Using Excel has enabled me to unpack different insights from data based on what I want to achieve. Using Excel may be daunting at first, but I understood how each function or feature works and tied it to my data analysis needs and expectations.